SIMBAD references

This paper presents new and efficient algorithms for matching stellar catalogues, where the transformation between the coordinate systems of the two catalogues is unknown and might include shearing. The discovery of a given object, whether a star or asterism, from a first catalogue in a second catalogue is logarithmic in time rather than polynomial, which yields a dramatic speed-up relative to a naïve implementation. Both the acceleration of the matching algorithm and the ability to solve for arbitrary affine transformations will not only allow the registration of stellar catalogues and images that are now impossible to use, but will also find applications in machine vision and other imaging applications.